The bar and restaurant scene in downtown Huntington Beach is about to get classier. I hope.

Actually, there’s no way of telling yet. But Pacific City is opening next week — that gigondo development just south of the HB pier — and, when it’s finally full sometime early next year, there will be more than a dozen places with ABC licenses. (That’s not counting the adjacent new hotel.)

Rumor has it they’ll be selling local craft beer in the food court, Lot 579, when it launches in February.

Some of the restos and bars coming in will undoubtedly be classy. I’m looking forward to a seafooder called Ways & Means (it was one of my favorite haunts in downtown Orange during its brief life there).

During a hard-hat tour I took last week, I checked out the two most eye-popping spots in the new mall: a couple of top-level spaces with spectacular views of the pier and ocean. I’m told they will be occupied by high-end restaurant-bars.

Say what you will about Pacific City (and I’m not totally thrilled myself with its odd architecture and its potentially disruptive influence on downtown traffic), it’s a welcome addition to the dreary H.B. bar scene.

While it’s been slowly improving over the last couple of years (I love the bar at Hyatt’s Watertable and Dann Bean’s wonderful Main Street Wine Company), downtown H.B. still has way, way too many low-end watering holes for rowdy millennials. Pacific City will give those who are serious about wine, beer and cocktails some viable alternatives — I hope.

The world’s two biggest beer companies are joining forces. Could this be the first salvo in an epic battle against craft breweries, whose meteoric rise is capturing a growing chunk of the market?

Earlier this month, 3G Capital’s Anheuser-Busch InBev reached a tentative deal to purchase SABMiller for $104.6 billion.The new behemoth could control 80 percent of the American beer market if the DoJ doesn’t force it to spin off a label or two.

I’m working on a story about the big guy-small guy Battle of the Brews for this Sunday’s Business section. I interviewed several local craft brewers about the topic.

Here’s what brewery operations manager Kyle Manns at TAPS in Brea had to say.

Q. Do you think the mega-brewers have it in for the craft beer makers?

A. I have an email in front of me saying that one of the largest breweries is buying up most of the aluminum cans. It’s now harder for craft breweries to buy cans. I have a big concern with that. My worry is that (the big companies) will be buying the resources on the back end of things.

Q. What else could they control?

A. Hops as well. They’re buying these breweries that make a lot of IPAs. They are gonna possibly make them in mass quantities, and that will take a lot of hops. With global warming the crop reports get worse and worse each year for hops. They could easily corner the market.

Q. What else are the big boys doing to make life harder for craft breweries like yours?

A. They are now buying distributors. They bought two or three in Colorado and are making it harder generally for them to sell craft beer.

Q. A lot of the big companies are selling faux-craft beer like Blue Moon now. What do you think of that?

A. I think there is some danger. If McDonald’s started selling charcuterie sandwiches, would we think McDonald’s was okay? It’s a slippery slope in my eyes. While it helps newcomers get into craft beer, they’re gonna put all this money into marketing and getting the word out; it is misleading.

Q. What about the mega-breweries buying up craft beer makers? If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, right?

A. But are the recipes the same? They’re letting the genie out of the bottle. I don’t know what’s going to happen going forward.

I know, I know, you’re probably skeptical about all those news stories about the health benefits of red wine.
But the good news keeps piling up. Here’s some of the latest:

Researchers at Oregon State’s College of Agricultural Studies recently announced that wine drinking could lead to weight loss. Woo hoo!

The team spent 10 weeks gorging mice on a high-fat diet. Once the little Mickeys were nice and porky, half of them were given extracts from Pinot noir grapes; the other half got regular old mouse chow. The wined-and-dined mice stored less liver fat and had lower blood sugar. How come? Certain grapes stunt the growth of fat cells and nearly stop new ones in their tracks. Cool. (Sure, you could get the same effect by eating a few red grapes. But how fun would that be?)

Here are some additional red wine benefits that have recently become more accepted:

More winemakers are now avoiding sulfites (the common term for sulfur dioxide). This is great news for those who suffer from sulfite allergies, although there’s a lot of debate about the chemical’s other harmful effects.

Sulfur dioxide is a preservative that’s widely used in winemaking because it prevents oxidation and other kinds of deterioration. It helps preserve a wine’s freshness. But careful storage can do the same thing. So by all means buy the sulfite-free wine – but treat it like your frail grandma.

Finally, there’s a lot more attention being paid to organic and biodynamic farming, especially among smaller growers and vintners. And technical innovations such as optical scanners and phenolic analysis mean wine is getting cleaner and more carefully made than ever. So drink up – just check the label first!

As I mentioned last month, I was working with a talented intern name Bo McMillan to produce a story on the current state of flavored vodkas. (Actually, Bo did all of the heavy lifting. I tasted a lot of interesting vodkas, added my two cents and talked to Carl Nolet Jr.)

Here’s the full story, in case you missed it in the Register:

Remember the bar scene a decade or so ago? We liked our cocktails sweet and wacky. (Names like the Boom Shaka Laka, Sex on the Beach and the Fuzzy Navel didn’t exactly suggest restraint, did they?)

Even our spirits were crazily flavored. Chief among them was vodka. Once prized for its neutral taste, Russia’s national booze was hijacked by a clown posse and infused with apple, cherry, chocolate, coconut, coffee, marshmallow, melon, peach, pumpkin pie, raspberry, vanilla and countless other flavors. (Does anyone remember Berri Acai? Was that just a bad dream?)

Now vodka, bless the bartending gods, has come back to earth. After years of growth, flavored vodka sales slid 4 percent in 2014, according to Euromonitor, a market research firm.

But vodka has learned something from its ill-advised escapade. Its flavors make intrinsic sense now. Thanks to the artisanal movement, many flavored vodkas are more subtle, natural and sensible, and they give the noble spirit the respect it deserves.

“There are two sides to flavored vodka,” said Forrest Cokely, an Orange County spirits enthusiast and blogger who worked for years at Costa Mesa’s Hi-Time Wine Cellars. “One is downward-spiraling very quickly, and one has upward momentum with tenuous respect.”

At last weekend’s Wine & Food Festival in Newport Beach, some sommeliers and other professionals in the wine industry said that the drought had brought unexpected benefits to California’s wine regions.

One common opinion is that with the right varietals, dry (or nearly dry) farming is possible. Jerry Lohr, Justin Smith and other Central Coast winemakers are famously stingy with water. The general consensus about the 2013 and ’14 has been that wise water management, coupled with perfect weather for grapes, have resulted in excellent vintages for many California winemakers, with grapes of remarkable concentration.

But make no mistake — the drought, if it continues, will profoundly affect the wine industry (and, of course, other forms of agriculture, not to mention future development). The situation is especially dire on the Central Coast, where agriculture east of Paso Robles depends on the area’s natural aquifer. Consider this sobering news in the San Luis Obispo Tribune:

A new analysis of the Paso Robles groundwater basin shows that aquifer levels near Paso Robles will drop an additional 70 feet if pumping continues unabated over the next 30 years.

The new hydrological analysis commissioned by the San Luis Obispo County Department of Public Works updates the calculations of how much water was pumped from the basin from 1981 to 2011 and estimates how much will be pumped from 2012 to 2040 under growth and no-growth scenarios.

The no-growth scenario assumes no new pumping from the basin. The growth scenario assumes a 1 percent increase in vineyard, municipal, rural domestic and small commercial pumping.

County supervisors disagree on the severity of the problem but said this week that management of the basin to prevent over-pumping is needed.

“It suggests that if we don’t do something significantly different, there will be very serious problems going forward,” said Supervisor Bruce Gibson, chairman of the board. “Right now we have to deal with the stark reality that we have a basin that is in serious decline.”

TAPS Fish House & Brewery has won several top honors at the 2015 Great American Beer Festival.

The restaurant and craft brewery, with locations in Brea, Irvine and Corona, was awarded Mid-Size Brewpub and Mid-Size Brewer of the Year. (This is the third time TAPS has won the honor in six years.) Four of its beers also received medallions: The Velvet Hog, a chocolate beer category, and TAPS Irish Red both were given golds; they’re produced at TAPS’ Corona facility. TAPS Kellerbier and a pilsner called Amend This! won silver and bronze, respectively. They are made at the TAPS in Brea.

The awards are the first received by TAPS’ new brewing team, David Huls of Barley Forge Brewing Co. and Kyle Manns of Anaheim’s Bottle Logic Brewing, who replaced TAPS veteran brewmaster Victor Novak earlier this year. (The boys strike a typical TAPS pose, above.)

Several other local breweries did well at this year’s festival, held annually in Denver.

Bottle Logic won golds for its Lagerithm, an American-style dark lager, and its Cobaltic Porter. Karl Strauss’ Costa Mesa location was awarded a silver medal for its Singularity, an American-style black ale. And Noble Ale Works of Anaheim snagged a bronze for its Nose Candy, a session India pale ale.